5 minutes could save you 50 dollars or more on textbooks

Let me tell you the story of a now-enlightened college student, whom I shall call “Joseph.” The first semester of Joseph’s freshman year at Rice, he naively decided to take a 400-level course (which shall remain unnamed), which required the purchase of approximately 100 dollars worth of “required” textbooks. But just before he emptied my wallet at the bookstore, he happened to remember something his professor had said about “course reserves” at Fondren.

He soon found out that these mysterious course reserves were a set of items which one can only check out for a certain period of time because they have been “reserved” by a professor for the use of students in that particular class. All he had to do was go to the circulation desk with the call number of his item (book, CD, DVD, or whatever), and one of the librarians would retrieve your item(s) for you.

And so, Joseph used the course reserves to check out his required textbook once a week to do the required readings, and his wallet lived happily ever.

The same thing happened to Joseph this past fall semester in an English class. While Joseph watched as the rest of the noobs in his class wasted precious moolah on the “required” textbooks, Joseph simply went to Fondren the day before class to do the reading for class the next day.

Okay, that’s enough of that. In case you didn’t realize, the “Joseph” in that story was me. So I have first-hand experience (not third-person experience as the story might suggest) benefitting from Fondren’s course reserves.

Besides having to physically go to Fondren, the only catch is that you usually can’t leave Fondren with the item. Also, you have to go up to the circulation desk every 2 hours to renew the item if you need it for a longer period of time than that (however, you may be able to convince the librarians to extend your check-out period, if, for example, the item is a 3-hour movie).

So do yourself a favor and check out the Fondren course reserves site here.

Note that you can search by instructor, course number (e.g. PHIL 342, CHEM 212, etc.), or course name (e.g. Physical Chemistry for Biosciences, Organic Chemistry, etc.).

The course reserves don’t have the textbooks for every Rice University course, but it’s definitely worth looking at, especially during the first week of classes, so you can determine your budget for that semester. All I’m asking in return is that you send me a mere 10% of what you save on textbooks from now on.

I accept cash or check.